Page 35 - Desert Oracle June 2020

100 yards or more from the seawall, so we were letting

guys out and they’re running across a hundred yards or
so of sand,” he explains. As a gunner’s mate assigned to

a sation in the aft section of the LST, Hanna says he did

not see the action on the beach but knows the success of
his ship’s delivery. “We had no casualties…we los

nobody going onto the beach, all the British soldiers we

landed made it.”

Over the ensuing two months, his LST would make more

than a dozen trips back and forth between England and
France, ferrying wounded and prisoners of war one way

and then returning with more supplies and equipment for
the war efort.

“There was a sense of accomplishment after you get the

troops on the beach (that) we’ve done it,” Hanna
remembers. “And, then you bless yourself one more time,

saying, ‘Thank God.’ I had had enough of blood and guts

at that point.”

By late September 1944, Hanna was bound for home

aboard an ocean liner to Lido Beach, New York. He’d
have 30 days leave before reassignment to another

brand-new LST, the 1079, built in Hingham and bound for
duty in the Pacifc. As with 308, Hanna went aboard as a

“plank owner,” a member of the commissioning crew and

sailed through the Panama Canal and on to Pearl Harbor
and the Pacifc islands. The 1079 did not see combat,

rather ferrying troops and equipment among the islands

and to the Philippines. At the war’s end, he found himself
at Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco.

A cross-country troop train would bring him and hundreds
of other troops from San Francisco to Boson. He’d arrive

at Springfeld’s Union Station to be greeted by his